I was struck by two murder stories yesterday. The first, I admit, was not so much a story as an opinion guaranteed to generate column inches in the arts pages of Britain's broadsheets. Martin Amis declared at the Guardian Hay Festival that poetry was dead. And, to be fair, he gave some pretty convincing and elegantly worded reasons as to who and what might have killed it: the rapidity of the modern world and our own goldfish minds being the most salient and believable.
The second murder story concerned the death of "God's banker" Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging beneath London's Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. Calvi's death has inspired almost as many conspiracy theories as did that of Princess Diana. Yesterday, an Italian court cleared all five defendants accused of murdering him. Within hours of this verdict, a poem by Simon James, titled The Final Straw, appeared on YouTube. Accompanied by bleak black and white footage of the Thames, the young poet attempts to imagine Calvi's last moments on earth.
Whether you like the poem or not is really beside the point. What matters to me is that it does go an awfully long way to disproving our Martin's notion that poetry is, almost by definition, unable to keep up.
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